If there’s anything better than a good time-travel movie, it’s MORE good time travel movies. Also, Rocky Horror. Aaaaand dancing. Luckily I’ve combined all of these most excellent things into my newest shirt design “Let’s do the Time Warp (again!)” which is now up for voting on Threadless!

For this design, I’ve taken the main characters from some of my all-time favorite time-travel movies, and shown them illustrating the steps to the infamous Time Warp dance from Rocky Horror. I chose a classic info-graphics style using just two colors on a silver shirt. Here’s a larger version of the design, along with my original pencil sketch, and a mockup of what it will look like on a shirt.

Here’s a link to the design, which will be up for voting through October 13th. Please take a moment to vote for it, and help it get printed! As always, if this design IS printed, I’ll be giving away a free shirt to FIVE of the people who comment on the submission, so be sure to leave a comment while you’re there! Thanks!

One of my designs that’s caused the most curiosity is “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World“, as I used linocut process to create the design – an art form that’s not terribly prevalent in the t-shirt design community.

Specifically for this design, I’m working with with a linocut process that involves carving out an image then blockprinting it. For the subject I’ve chosen “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World”, which is of course a Grizzly Bear on a Motorcycle carrying a Great White Shark with a Laser on its head. Naturally.

Here's my initial sketch.

Priming lino substrate with gesso

Initial drawing scanned in and flipped, then transferred onto lino using carbon paper

After transferring the initial sketch, I marked it up with a Sharpie to show the dark areas of the print.

Carving, carving and more carving. Incidentally, yes, those little red bits are blood. Carving tools are incredibly sharp, as it turns out.

I'll also be printing this as a limited edition blockprint, so I decided to add in a background.

Final carving!

A friend of mine works at a traditional print shop and has access to blockprinting equipment and offered to lend a hand. When I got to the print shop I realiezed that I had left my camera, and had to take some photos with my phone, so excuse the quality. Also, I wish I could have taken more shots, but I was actually printing most of the time, and my hands were pretty well inked up.

Ok, so here's the basic print setup with the lino plate and paper on the press

This is the ink we were using

To get a smooth coat of ink on the roller, first you spread some on a sheet of glass

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After rolling ink onto the 'plate', you center it on the press bed, lay your paper on top, along with a press board, and run it through

Then continue to roll it out back and forth until there are no streaks or dead spots - this means the roller is evenly coated with ink

My phone freaked out with the grid pattern in the background of this shot, but here's one of the early prints. The weird stripes are from my phone's wonky camera, and not on the actual print.

After a couple of test runs, we tried more ink and got a stronger print, but by then my hand were too dirty to take a picture, but here's a scan of the final print.

I’ll use the full plate to print a limited run of prints, but for the t-shirt, I extracted the central characters from the background and removed the border to make it more of a shirt-friendly design. Here’s the final shirt, which is available now through my shop: http://shop.ianleino.com hand-screened on American Apparel shirts for $18.

The final printed shirt

So there it is! Linocut process from start to front. I lost track of time, but imagine that after I had the design worked out, it took around 20-30 hours of carving the linocut and then a few more hours to set up and print the actual image. Thanks for taking a look, and if you’d like to wear one of these yourself get over to my shop to pick one up!

I have a bad habit of coming up with ideas, maybe even doing some sketching, but never finishing them. That’s why I’ve decided to challenge myself to go through my idea list and sketchpad, pick things that felt promising, and actually work on one design at a time until it’s complete. It’s been going well so far, and I have two shirt designs finished and sold to online shirt sites. To celebrate their releases, I’m also writing up process blogs for each design to give anyone interested a little insight into how I put things together, since it tends to be different for almost every design.

So, while I’m waiting on those designs to print so I can publish their tutorials, but I’m still in the tutorial-writing mood, are there any of my existing designs you’d like me to feature here with a tutorial / process blog? Any of my designs for Threadless, Woot, TeeFury, DesignByHumans, other online shops or any of my client designs are wide open for tutorial-izing, so let me know what you’d like to see.

SausageFest is an annual party (now in its 3rd year) that my wife and I throw at the end of summer for all of our friends as well as some of my local design clients and vendors. And to answer your question: yes, we do allow girls to come too.

This year’s festivities included 20 lbs of bratwurst from a local organic farm, a full keg of craft brewed Kolsch beer and a variety of summer games from bocce to volleyball, as well as possibly the 2nd worst game of barefoot basketball ever played (you should have seen last year.)

Previous years’ shirts have been such a smash hit that lots of people have asked about them after the event, and several of our friends have even had strangers attempt to buy the shirts right off their backs!

For that reason, we decided to print up a few extras this year, and offer them for sale through my shop to those who weren’t able to attend the ‘Fest but still want to proudly display their love of all things sausage-y.

This year’s shirts are printed on lightweight super-soft vintage style ringer tees to complement the retro style of the illustration. Here are sizing charts for both, along with a few photos of celebrants modeling them:

DesignByHumans.com is having their annual end-of-summer clearance sale and my ever-popular “Chariots Retired” design, that collects some of the most famous (not to mention awesome) vehicles of the 80′s is on sale for just $15.

It’s printed on their amazingly soft 50/50 “perfect tee”, and is still available in all sizes for men and women. All of their other shirts are also on sale for $15, with free shipping on orders over $70 so grab a couple others while you’re there!

Well, it appears that at long last I have finally tamed the beast of WordPress, and I have my new site up and running. I still have lots of content to migrate over from my previous site, and I’ll also be posting occasional general interest blogs as well as tutorials and process walkthoughs for some of my illustration and design work, so be sure to check back in or subscribe to the RSS feed using the SUBSCRIBE button on the top left.

Also, if you have any suggestions or tips, or if you have a specific design you’d like me to dissect in a process blog, please leave me a comment or feel free to contact me using my contact form .

Several months back, a blog was started on Threadless where artists uploaded the original sketches for some of their winning designs. It quickly grew to be quite popular, with many of the community members asking for it to be compiled into a book. I offered to take on the task, and over two months, I collected the work of 66 different Threadless alumni and compiled them into The Threadless Sketchbook, along with an introduction from Jake Nickell, the founder of Threadless!

On the 120 pages, you’ll get an insight into the diverse styles and working methods of a broad range of artists who have been printed at Threadless. And best of all, ALL of the profits from the book will be donated to a fundraiser to help bring people to the annual Threadless meetup!